Treasure Trove of Cambrian Fossils Discovered in China

Treasure trove of Cambrian fossils discovered in China

Huge fossil bonanza preserves 512-million-year-old ecosystem. A treasure trove of Cambrian fossils has been discovered in southern China, providing a window on marine life shortly after Earth's first mass extinction event.Han Zeng at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology in China and his colleagues began finding fossils at a quarry in the mountainous region of Huayuan County in Hunan Province in 2021. So far, they have analysed 8681…

Significant Find of Cambrian Explosion Fossils

A recent paper in Nature details what scientists found at the Huayuan biota: Here we report the Huayuan biota — a lower Cambrian (Stage 4, approximately 512 million years ago) BST Lagerstätte from an outer shelf, deep-water setting of the Yangtze Block in Hunan, South China. The Huayuan biota yields remarkable taxonomic richness, comprising 153 animal species of 16 phylum-level clades dominated by arthropods, poriferans and cnidarians, among whi…